Cybercrimes

Critical Issues in a Global Context

Anita Lavorgna

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781352009040
• eBook ISBN: 9781350306066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This new textbook offers a systematic introduction to a wide array of cybercrimes, exploring their diversity and the range of possible responses to them. Combining coverage of theoretical perspectives with more technical knowledge, the book is divided into ten chapters which first lay the foundations of the topic and then consider the most important types of cybercrimes – from crimes against devices to political offences – before finally exploring ways to prevent, disrupt, analyse and better comprehend them. Examples from several countries are included, in the attempt to show how crime and deviance in cyberspace are truly global problems, with different countries experiencing comparable sets of challenges. At the same time, the author illustrates how these challenges manifest themselves differently, depending on the socio-legal culture of reference. This text offers an accessible introduction to the topic for all those studying cybercrimes at undergraduate or postgraduate level. Whether students approach the topic from a criminological, legal or computer science perspective, this multidisciplinary approach of this text provides a common language to guide them through the intricacies of criminal and deviant behaviours in cyberspace.

1	INTRODUCTION

The context and purpose of this book

This book presents an introduction to cybercrimes and is addressed specifically at students with different backgrounds and interests, aiming to provide them with a common language and guide them throughout the intricacies of criminal and deviant behaviours in cyberspace. Academic curricula are acknowledging the momentous change caused by the pervasiveness of cyberspace and are expanding their courses on cybercrimes. On the one hand, criminology programmes are proposing modules targeting students with (mostly) socio-legal and psychology backgrounds and supplying them with sufficient understanding of the cyber dimension of crime and deviance. On the other hand, computer science and engineering programmes are developing courses and degrees targeting students with more ‘technical’ backgrounds and interests. While these courses are comparable in their aim of preparing future workers for entry to the emerging cybersecurity professions, they differ in their approaches and employability prospects. Criminology courses prepare experts for work in the private sector, public administration or policing and frequently operate as a link between sector-based and technological experts, while technical courses train professionals in business or consultancy companies to design, build and control secure systems. In addition, in recognition of the intrinsic complexity of the field, new interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary degrees have been developed in an attempt to bring together the skills and expertise needed to form a new generation of highly prepared and employable students.

A big educational challenge needs to be addressed: if, on the one hand, criminology students need to understand with sufficient precision ‘how’ things (might) occur in cyberspace, then, on the other hand, computer science students must develop a sound appreciation of some of the ‘big themes’ in the social and legal sciences (think, for instance, of the debates on the shifting balance between privacy and security in cyberspace) in order to have the instruments to deal with the complexities and challenges they are likely to encounter in their future jobs. This educational challenge has broad social implications that go beyond problems of employability: in order to appreciate and preserve both our individual rights and public goods in the digital age, technical knowledge alone is not enough. Professionals working from different angles to promote and preserve security in cyberspace need to be able to critically assess the delicate trade-offs and complexities they are called to intervene in; if not, there is a risk that the remedy will be worse than the disease.

In understanding cybercrimes, there is an inherent interrelation between distinct disciplines; only a multi- and transdisciplinary approach can allow us to understand more fully the multidimensional nature of cyberspace and to underline several of the existing and emerging challenges of crime and deviancy in our times. As a consequence, even if this book is grounded in criminology, it also aims to deal rigorously with more technical aspects (without lingering on technicalities) and to give account of the broader socio-legal contexts that can be beneficial for a more comprehensive and in-depth understanding of some current and emerging problems in cyberspace. After all, students of crime and crime control are taught to look beyond the confines of their subject matter (Garland & Sparks 2000; Stratton et al. 2017). Criminology has, by its very nature, traditionally drawn upon scholarship from a wide range of disciplines, ranging from law, sociology and philosophy to economics, history and psychology. Nowadays, disciplines such as computer and data science should also be considered, to avoid irrelevancy in addressing questions of contemporary crime and deviance.

This book does not focus on a specific jurisdiction. Rather, examples from several countries are included, in an attempt to show how crime and deviance in cyberspace are global problems, with different countries experiencing comparable sets of challenges. At the same time, however, we will see how these challenges manifest themselves differently, depending on the socio-legal culture of reference; hence, effective solutions cannot ignore local specificities. Indeed, the maxim ‘think globally act locally’ is particularly pertinent in the field of cybercrimes (Grabosky & Smith 1998; Broadhurst 2006). After all, as Wall (2007) pointed out, even a virtual act has to resurface in the local, physical space at some point – via the offender (because a crime has to be committed somewhere), via the victim (who is victimised somewhere) or via the investigation (which has to take place somewhere).

This multidisciplinary and international approach is reflected in my academic background and developed in my research and teaching experiences: I have a background in law and international studies but have been working as criminologist since my PhD, leaning increasingly towards computational criminology; I am used to teaching a wide variety of students from different backgrounds and with different interests. In addition, I am an Italian scholar with international experience working in British academia, an (old) ‘millennial’ born between digital immigrants and digital natives, and I am a woman – which makes me part of a minority in relation to ‘cybercrime experts’. I hope that these features will help me to bring a new perspective into the cybercrime narrative and to offer an interesting account to those approaching this fascinating area of inquiry.

Please note that we are using the plural form: cybercrimes and not cybercrime. In general parlance, people still use the term ‘cybercrime’ for the hodgepodge of illegal behaviours that can be easily clustered together and separated from other illegal behaviours by occurring online, this being their discerning factor. As will emerge from this book, this interpretation is incorrect or at least hardly useful in comprehending sufficiently crime and deviance in cyberspace. With the blurring of online and offline in our daily lives, it makes less and less sense to think of ‘cyber’ as a unicum which can be kept apart from our (‘real’) routines. Digital technologies and social media in particular are so embedded in our everyday lives that we are increasingly part of a ‘digital society’ (Lupton 2014; Stratton et al. 2017). In the physical world, we would never equate a murder, a verbal offence after an altercation and a bicycle theft; similarly, in cyberspace, we need to be careful when distinguishing between very different sets of crimes. Over the years of criminological debate, several typologies of cybercrimes have been proposed. Trying to further the ongoing debates on how to best synthesise and comprehend cybercrimes and to define and refine what exactly we mean by the notion of cybercrime, this book proposes an updated typology (that is, a set of categories used for classification), which will be presented and explained in Chapter 2.

It is worth noting in this introduction that, while the focus of this book is on cyber-crimes – which by definition occur when a law is broken – we will also encounter behaviours that are deviant rather than illegal – that is, behaviours that break an accepted code of behaviour, even if they might not necessarily infringe a specific law. Think, for instance, of antisocial behaviours (including those of a violent nature) carried out in online virtual worlds or multiplayer online role-playing games such as Minecraft or Fortnite; or consider the creation of false new stories being propagated online. Some of these behaviours might be considered ‘microdeviations’ and, as such, be ignored by authorities because of the normality of deviance (Popham 2018). This approach is very common in criminology, which looks beyond strict legal definitions to examine social context and investigate why certain activities are labelled as ‘crimes’ while others are not. Furthermore, this is a convenient choice in a socio-legal context – that of cyberspace – which is evolving extremely fast, with legal frameworks and social perceptions on cyber-threats and risks yet to be settled. Such ongoing evolution depends not only on the emergence of technological innovations but also on the changes taking place in the political and economic arenas of our ‘information age’, changes that have important legal and ethical implications (Boyle 1996). Deviance and the relationship between deviance and crime have always been insightful concepts to understand the power relationships in society, as they can be used not only to label harmful behaviours but also to stigmatise and disem-power certain social groups (Adler & Adler 2006). Furthermore, observing how these concepts change through time and space affords us an excellent viewpoint of broader societal changes. These perspectives also hold true in cyberspace.

Approaching crime in cyberspace

In our hyper-connected world, it is becoming difficult to imagine a crime that does not involve an ‘online’ component, if only because the network infrastructure provided by the internet is an increasing part of our everyday routines. Information technology is fundamental for people to fully participate in modern society, with the internet becoming a ubiquitous and integral part in the everyday lives of many. In cyberspace, the virtual and figurative space created within the internet, offenders are finding a new environment in which to operate – one that is virtually unlimited, enabling instantaneous communication for the propagation and sale of ideas, goods and services, with huge possibilities for deception. Cyberspace is not criminogenic per se; it is simply a new social space connecting people and facilitating commerce. However, by taking some of the features that characterise late modernity to the extreme, cyberspace is particularly prone to exploitation, to the carrying out of countless illicit and malicious behaviours in very effective ways. Nowadays, in the context of ubiquitous computing – that is, the emerging trend of embedding computational capability into everyday objects, making them constantly connected – the potential for exploitation is growing even more.

A core question that will accompany us throughout the book is whether and to what extent cybercrimes are extensions of traditional crimes or whether they pose qualitatively and quantitatively new types of challenges. We will see that it can be very difficult to separate the offline from the online in our mundane experiences, as the internet’s pervasiveness is what gives it its significance (Miller 2009). Hence, it is often more useful to interpret crime in cyberspace as an expansion of crime possibilities occurring in ‘normal’ space. This is what McGuire (2007) called ‘hyperspatialisation’, a term capturing the complexity of contemporary social spaces, where there is a continuity between the online and the offline realms: what happens in one space often spills over into the other, with the internet influencing our culture and our changing culture influencing cyberspace in return. Even if we accept the fact that cybercrimes are mostly adaptations or expansions of traditional crimes, this does not imply that the different system of risks and opportunities framed by new technologies does not change criminals’ characteristics and modus operandi. This is why it is still heuristically useful to distinguish (crime in) the physical world from (crime in) cyberspace – after all, this is a book on cybercrimes, not on crimes in general.

Cyberspace is the setting of the activities and behaviours we will encounter in the following chapters, so it is worth expending a few lines on it before venturing on with this book. The term ‘cyberspace’ has an interesting genesis: it was first popularised by the American-Canadian writer William Gibson in his 1984 science fiction novel Neuromancer, which narrates the story of a talented hacker uncovering a conspiracy advanced by artificial intelligence in a cyberpunk dystopia. In the novel, cyberspace is a futuristic non-place which is accessed by physically connecting the brain to a computer to become part of a consensual hallucination. In its current representations, cyberspace is something different, even if, unlike most of the notions and concepts addressed in this book, it does not have an agreed definition. We generally refer to cyberspace as the social space in which or through which cybercrimes occur, a social space, generally depicted as potentially inclusive of all social groups, being global and borderless. In reality, however, this is not (yet) always the case, which is something we always need to bear in mind to properly understand cybercrimes today. Hence, before we start to discuss crime and deviancy, it is important to linger a little on the extent to which we can consider cyberspace truly inclusive, global and borderless.

It is true that cyberspace is accessible to an increasing number of people. According to the latest Internet World Stats (2019), the internet penetration rate (defined as the number of individuals who have access to the internet at home, via computer or mobile device) is almost 57 percent on a global scale, peaking to 89 percent in North America and 87 percent in Europe. Approximately 43 percent of the global population have access to social media, ranging from 6 percent in Middle Africa to 70 percent in North America (Statista 2019). With the increased use of devices such as smart-phones, now owned by over a third of the world’s population (Statista 2019), a growing number of people can access cyberspace from anywhere. However, one should not lose sight of the fact that about 45 percent of the world population still does not have an easy or reliable way to get online. The so-called digital divide – that is, the gap between those who do and those who do not have access to the internet – is a serious social (and technological) problem, deepening existing inequalities. Nowadays, being offline means being excluded from key opportunities to access important services or participate in political debate (Berners-Lee 2018). That is why the United Nations declared internet access to be a human right (like food and clean water) in 2016.

Even if the physical access gap is closing in most parts of the world, other gaps are still deep and wide in high-tech societies, where only people with a certain position in society (such as the young and employed, from higher-income families or those in receipt of a higher level of education) expect basic access to the internet and its services (van Dijk 2005). In certain countries, women and people living in rural areas are likely to remain offline (Berners-Lee 2018). Age is also an important discriminating factor regarding usage of the internet, with digital immigrants (those who invented technologies and systems pre-internet but became familiar with cyberspace as adults) and digital natives (those growing up in the digital age) representing different worldviews and thinking and processing information in different ways. Furthermore, while cyberspace is potentially borderless in nature, it is growing less and less so: new geopolitical boundaries are becoming embedded in its structure. Think, for instance, of the ‘Great Firewall of China’ – that is, a combination of technological and regulatory measures prescribed by the People’s Republic of China to block access to a number of foreign internet services and to slow down cross-border internet traffic.

Finally, if we consider cyberspace as a global context of communication, it is worth underlining how it allows language socialisation and the consequent creation of a sense of collective identity to take place in new ways; physical and social cues are reduced and language choices facilitate interactions among transnational and diaspora networks around the world. After all, geographical boundaries do not coincide with linguistic ones. Besides English (which, due to its broad circulation around the world, is often perceived as a neutral language to use in multilingual contexts), online communities cluster around many other languages, sometimes giving rise to new hybrid and simplified codes (as in the case of Arabic online) (Danet & Herring 2007; Lam 2008). In a global English-centred research context, where most published research on cybercrimes focuses on English-speaking online communities, the linguistic diversity and multilingualism of the internet are things we should always keep in mind and we must be cautious in generalising research results.

The content of this book

This book comprises 10 chapters which can be logically divided into three main parts. The first part has laid the foundations of the topic with this introduction (Chapter 1), then offers a digression on the historical, legal and criminological aspects of cybercrimes (Chapter 2) and an introduction to key theoretical elements needed to better understand and interpret cybercrimes (Chapter 3). In more detail, Chapter 2 shows that, even if there is consensus on the fact that cybercrimes are serious crimes, and generally on the rise, they still lack any agreed definition: the main legal framework we have at an international level is outdated, with criminologists, lawyers and computer scientists alike proposing and debating various ways to define and categorise crime in cyberspace. The fact is that the concept of ‘cybercrime’, as we will see, has been socially constructed and refined through time and is still evolving. Moreover, Chapter 2 will discuss how consensus is also absent on the size of the cybercrime industry: measuring crime is not easy, and measuring crime in cyberspace can be particularly challenging. Chapter 3, on the other hand, will briefly outline...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Boxes
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Outlining cybercrimes
• 3 Theorising cybercrimes
• 4 Crimes against devices
• 5 Crimes against persons
• 6 Crimes of deception and coercion
• 7 Market-based crimes and crimes against property
• 8 Political offences
• 9 Disrupting cybercrimes and the need for crime prevention
• 10 Cybercrime research and the future of cybercrimes
• References
• Index